AppleTV Take 2

Given my post on how I hacked my AppleTV v1 was, according to Google Analytics, my most popular/viewed post, I've decided that I'll recount my experiences for AppleTV Take 2.

I'd been putting this off for a bit until a few more of the apps I like were available for Take2 (which is just Apple's name for v2). So this past weekend seemed as good a time as any, so I kicked in to it.

Firstly: many of the websites mentioned that the upgrade from v1.1 to v2 would delete any AVIs sitting on the machine, and since these were the only copies I had of some of the stuff I decided backing them up would be a good idea.
Turned out that the upgrade left them all alone, so you may want to skip this stage.

Useful command time: rather than dragging things across using Fugu (for an SCP connection) I decided to do a bit of hunting and find commands to all of the backup in one foul (slow) swoop. The directory I had previously created on the AppleTV was 'Movies' under the user frontrow so the command you want to move them all across to the local computers Movies folder is:
scp -1 -r frontrow@appletv.local:~/Movies/ /Users/USERNAME/Movies/

Allow a long period of time.

Having backed everything up I ran the update, took about 5 minutes to download everything and then 10-15 to install it all. Not very exciting seeing small white bars move across the stage, but eh. It didn't break anything. And all my music was available and I could surf YouTube. Woohoo.

However I couldn't connect to the box so needed to install SSH. Again a patchstick seemed the easiest way - as it's non-invasive and I was watching a DVD at the time. Rather than going through the tutorial again, the best description I found on the web was here. You'll need a 512mb USB drive, 10.4.9 combo updater (link on the site to download), AppleTV 1.1 (link on site) and your MacOS 10.4 install disks - the ones that came with your computer are fine. Or steal from somewhere.
the process is quite simple and went pretty quickly, so I soon had an SSH enabled appletv.

Connecting to the appletv using terminal and ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local (or ip address) suggested all of the files I'd backed up were still there which was exciting.

The next step was to enable Sapphire (the AVI browser). Now the method to do this on appleTV1.1 was to load ATV Loader, sadly thats not compatible with Take2. So I had to load Sapphire manually. Reasonable instructions are available here. I found it easier to use Fugu and dump the downloaded files across to the AppleTV using that.

After a reboot etc things were rocking along, well I could see the files. Admittedly no codecs had been installed so I couldn't actually watch anything! So next step is codec installation.

Again found a good tutorial for this here. And that seemed to work well. I now have a Take2 AppleTV which is working nicely with my AVIs. I did have to delete off some Sapphire settings: (frontrow - Sapphire - @TV - and levels below that from memory) then got Sapphire to rescan the AVIs I had - which put them into the Movie and TV lists that the new version of Sapphire has.

Quite simple, painless and impressively didn't lose any of the files I had left on there.

Woohoo. And all while I watched Pollock, so arty and geeky. !!

love,me